Individual projects

The general objective of this interdisciplinary research is to outline the specific
features of the Bulgarian legal system faced to the late modern one and the
transformations of its institutional practices in the time of transition. The research
focus is the zones of “hybridization” between roles and identities into the frame of
relations between criminal law and psychiatric knowledge. The main problem is how
the penal power mechanisms and the way they function have produced different kinds
of identities of the “subjects”. “Subject” is used in the double sense of the word, first
as subject subordinated to the others, with dependence and control, and second, as
subject attached to one’s own personality by one’s ascribed identity. My particular
interest is in the manner in which the subjectivity is constituted by the legal and
medical power around such “deviant” social forms as insane (mentally ill), abnormal
and criminal ones. The following sub-objectives could be stated as problems to be
resolved: a) What are the structures of governance and level of the administrative
intervention in the legal system? b) What are the forms of institutionalizing and the
principles of differences between subjects and their identities? c) What are the main
instruments used in the court and prison institutions and what are types of goals
pursued by the legal professions? d) What are the social functions of the psychiatric
knowledge and what is the status of the deferent experts? e) What are the degrees of
rationality of the Bulgarian legal system: how efficiently does the penal power use the
instruments and what is the level of assurance regarding the desired result?